 |
Home
| How It Works
| Stats
Login | Register |
|
Case: Politically or Racially-Aware I believe in democracy. As a high school social sciences teacher, I strongly believe in democratic education and political awareness. I want my students to be aware of what is going on around them locally, nationally, and internationally. I require my students to keep up with news. Everything they learn from newspapers, magazines, and television becomes substance to use in my lessons. Before the presidential elections, I asked my students to watch all the debates, try to see the different perspectives, and how those perspectives may lead to different courses of action and to different implications for people. As part of this effort, I gave students a "persuasive writing" assignment. I gave them a list of topics from the debates, such as abortion, healthcare, affirmative action, and foreign policy. Students were to take a position on one of these issues and write a persuasive essay. When it was time for students to share their writings in class, things got out of hand. Every single topic we discussed along with the essays turned into a discussion of race. My Black and White students took opposite perspectives on every issue and during the discussions, they were not civil. I felt like my efforts for democratic education were not producing anything good. Should I change my activities? How come the political awareness I wanted develop in my students actually turned out to be racial awareness? Some guidance please! Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) I think that it is very important that we teach students how to participate in discussions with people who agree and disagree with them. In order to think critically about an issue, people need to discuss those issues with other people. However, when discussing controversial topics, teachers need to prepare their students for what is expected of them. As a teacher, I would complete a mini lesson that shows students how political discussion needs to be carried out. I would model the behavior I expect from my students and I would give them specific examples of what to say when they want to add to someone's comments or when they disagree with what is being said. By providing students with language they can use to build on comments of other students, they are less likely to say something that will offend someone else. I would also let the class develop norms for class discussions and post those norms in the class. |
||
Rating
|
||||||||||||||||||